#DigitalSkeptic: We Have Built an Internet of Really Vulnerable Things

"Basically anything with an IP address is open to attack," is how Adrian Turner summed it up to me during a frankly terrifying phone call.

Turner is both CEO of Mocana, a San Francisco information security firm, and the rarest of rarities in the security business: an executive not afraid to admit that his industry does a miserable job of communicating the preposterous risks lurking in the Information Age.

"Security vendors have fanned the flames of imminent collapse to drive sales. But the world is still in place," he said. "So people are numb to the news."

The dawning investor menace here, of course, is that value-destroying information-based attacks are no longer confined to the world's HP PCs, Apple iPads or even this or that Samsung smartphone. Serious processing capability, network connectivity and powerful software are finding their way into the world's most mundane things. This "Internet of Things" now connects everything from pacemakers to hotel door locks. And Turner is seeing a bewildering comprehension gap about the vulnerability of this Web of smart electronics.

"There is this illusion of blind trust in the electronics around us," he said. "So when gadgets betray us, we are shocked."

Even the most casual walk-through of this newly minted Internet of Things is astonishing in revealing its vulnerability.

The actual risk is probably minimal. After all, who really spends more than $5,000 on a toilet? But if after studying the app, the hack and the product, it's clear most everything in our homes thus connected can be compromised in similar ways.